Drawn Testimony: Sketching a generation’s most iconic criminal cases

Description

The trials of criminals who disgust and fascinate the world in equal measure continue to be depicted primarily not at the push of a button but the point of a pencil or the worn-down end of a pastel stub. It is the odd, bickering club of court artists – summoned at the last minute, jostling for position, scrambling to make permanent an event or expression that has already fled the scene – that is still charged with providing the pictures the world hungers to see, and depicting the faces it demands to know.

Jane Rosenberg has been a courtroom artist in New York for over 40 years. In her time on her benches, her pastels have captured some of the most notorious faces spanning multiple criminal eras: the Mafia crackdown of the 1980s and 1990s, the fallen titans of Wall Street’s ‘greed is good’ decade, the sex abusers brought to account by the #MeToo movement, the police brutality spotlighted by Black Lives Matter, and the relentless infighting of Trumpworld.

But whilst the cases and the many recognisable names might suggest this to be a true crime goldmine, this, it is not. Instead Jane offers the reader something entirely new – rather than focusing on the facts and minutiae of a case as it unfolds, we are instead given a moving and discerning view of a courtroom and its cast, focusing on emotion above procedure; rather than analysis of evidence, we are presented with the barely perceptible shifts in a defendant’s body language, the absence or abundance of feeling in their expression. The result is remarkable and sheds a light on the fascinating career which, arguably against the odds, has managed to stand the test of time.